An Homage to Ray Bradbury

The anniversary of his death reminds us he was a writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream.

“I can imagine all kinds of worlds and places, but I cannot imagine a world without Bradbury.” — Neil Gaiman

Ray Bradbury died on June 5, 2012 at the age of 91. Here is a partial list of his writing projects:

Novels

• 1950 The Martian Chronicles
• 1953 Fahrenheit 451
• 1957 Dandelion Wine
• 1962 Something Wicked This Way Comes
• 1972 The Halloween Tree
• 1985 Death Is a Lonely Business
• 1990 A Graveyard for Lunatics
• 1992 Green Shadows, White Whale
• 2001 From the Dust Returned
• 2003 Let’s All Kill Constance
• 2006 Farewell Summer

Collections

• 1947 Dark Carnival
• 1951 The Illustrated Man
• 1953 The Golden Apples of the Sun
• 1955 The October Country
• 1959 A Medicine for Melancholy
• 1959 The Day It Rained Forever
• 1962 The Small Assassin
• 1964 The Machineries of Joy
• 1965 The Vintage Bradbury
• 1966 Twice 22
• 1969 I Sing The Body Electric!
• 1975 Ray Bradbury
• 1976 Long After Midnight
• 1980 The Last Circus and the Electrocution
• 1980 The Stories of Ray Bradbury
• 1983 Dinosaur Tales
• 1984 A Memory of Murder
• 1988 The Toynbee Convector
• 1990 Classic Stories 1
• 1990 Classic Stories 2
• 1996 Quicker Than The Eye
• 1997 Driving Blind
• 1997 The Golden Apples of the Sun and Other Stories
• 1998 A Medicine For Melancholy And Other Stories
• 1998 I Sing The Body Electric! And Other Stories
• 2002 One More for the Road
• 2003 Bradbury Stories
• 2004 The Cat’s Pajamas: Stories
• 2005 A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories
• 2007 Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band is Playing & Leviathan ’99
• 2007 Summer Morning, Summer Night
• 2009 We’ll Always Have Paris: Stories
• 2010 A Pleasure To Burn

Over the years, I had stumbled across some of his quotes on writing. Here are two of my favorites:

Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”

“Stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do.”

Given that I wrote a book titled The Protagonist’s Journey: An Introduction to Character-Driven Screenwriting and Storytelling, it’s easy to see why I admire Bradbury’s observations.

A few years back, I purchased a copy of Bradbury’s book Zen in the Art of Writing. I so enjoyed reading it, I ran a weekly series on the blog: Sundays with Ray Bradbury. Here are links to each article.

Part 1: “So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy greed, old age, or death it can revitalize us amidst it all.”

Part 2: “If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer.”

Part 3: “Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with all his heart. Give him running orders. Shoot him off. Then follow as fast as you can go.”

Part 4: “Through those years I began to make lists of titles, to put down long lines of nouns. These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way towards something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.”

Part 5: “These are the stuffs, the foods, on which The Muse grows. This is the storehouse, the file, to which we must return every waking hour to check reality against memory, and in sleep to check memory against memory, which means ghost against ghost, in order to exorcise them, if necessary.”

Part 6: “Everything I’ve ever done was done with excitement, because I wanted to do it, because I loved doing it.”

Part 7: “That is the kind of life I’ve had. Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle, as an Irish police report once put it. Drunk with life, that is, and not knowing where off to next. But you’re on your way before dawn. And the trip? Exactly one half terror, exactly one half exhilaration.”

Part 8: “If all this sounds mechanical, it wasn’t. My ideas drove me to it, you see. The more I did, the more I wanted to do. You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can’t sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed.”

Part 9: “No tension, it follows, aesthetically as well as practically, must be built which remains unreleased. Without this, any art ends incomplete, halfway to its goal. And in real life, as we know, the failure to relax a particular tension can lead to madness.”

Part 10: “All my stories are cinematic. I may be the most cinematic novelist in the country today. All of my short stories can be shot right off the page. Each paragraph is a shot.”

Part 11: “So, stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do.”

For decades, Bradbury lived in a house in Cheviot Hills in Los Angeles. I used to pass by it when I would go for my daily run.

It was an inspiration to know that inside that humble house, Bradbury was busy typing away in his cluttered den.

Here are some excerpts from the New York Times obituary.

More than eight million copies of his books have been sold in 36 languages. They include the short-story collections “The Martian Chronicles,” “The Illustrated Man” and “The Golden Apples of the Sun,” and the novels “Fahrenheit 451” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

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Though his books became a staple of high school and college English courses, Mr. Bradbury himself disdained formal education. He went so far as to attribute his success as a writer to his never having gone to college.

— —

Mr. Bradbury referred to himself as an “idea writer,” by which he meant something quite different from erudite or scholarly. “I have fun with ideas; I play with them,” he said. “ I’m not a serious person, and I don’t like serious people. I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.”

He added, “My goal is to entertain myself and others.”

We remember you, Mr. Bradbury, and thank you for your stories.

To learn more about the man, check out this website: raybradbury.com.